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Behavioral & Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory

The Behavioral and Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory in the Department of Psychology is dedicated to examining biological and neuroscientific characteristics of behavior and cognition in rats and humans. In addition to this laboratory space, the Department maintains a state approved animal colony room. Dr. Robert Flint oversees the neuroscience research conducted in this lab and also holds classes such as Physiological Psychology, Learning, and Neuropsychology in the laboratory. Students interested in volunteering in Dr. Flint's lab should complete his Research Assistant Application. The pictures below from the lab show some of the equipment available for student research projects.

Morris Water Maze

The Morrs Water Maze is a behavioral test of spatial learning and memory in rodents. Animals are placed gently into a water tank where they search for a submerged platform. Animals learn relatively quickly to swim to the location of the platform using extramaze cues around the test room. The rate of acquisition and retention performance are common dependent measures. Successful performance of this task depends heavily on an intact and normally functioning hippocampus, a neural structure located within the medial temporal lobe of the brain. The neuroscience laboratory at Saint Rose is equipped with AnyMaze animal tracking software that allows digital cameras to track and and analyze the behavior of animals in mazes such as the Morris Water Maze.

Passive Avoidance Conditioning

Passive or inhibitory avoidance conditioning is a form of single-trial learning used with rodents. This form of learning is a particularly powerful tool for studying memory, because learning occurs in a single trial and the researcher is thus able to pinpoint the time at which the learning episode ends and memory consolidation processes occur.

Open Field Apparatus

The open field apparatus is simply a large platform on which the animal is placed. This apparatus is very useful for examining a wide variety of different things including general locomotor activity (distance and speed), short-term environmental habituation, and long-term environmental habituation. In addition, objects may be placed in certain locations of the open field (as demonstrated in the figure to the left) and thus object recognition memory or spatial location memory may be examined by recording the amount of time animals spend investigating each object.

Conditioned Taste Aversion

The Department of Psychology has 6 conditioned taste aversion chambers. Conditioned taste aversion is a form of classical conditioning. Animals are exposed to a novel flavor (e.g., sweetened water) and are subsequently administered a noxious compounds such as LiCl or lipopolysaccharid. On a subsequent test, animals will avoid consuming the sweetened water. This is another powerful behavioral test of learning, as it is acquired very quickly, often in only a single trial. This tasks seems to be particularly dependent on the amygdala, another temporal lobe structure.

T-Maze

The T-maze is simply a maze in the shape of a capital T. This maze is used to examine working memory in rodents. Animals are placed into the maze and allowed to freely explore it for a period of time during which the researcher marks down the pattern of arm entries. Animals with good intact working memory will alternate arm entries in the T-maze, whereas animals with poor working memory will tend to reenter the same arms repeatedly.

Elevated Plus-Maze

The elevated plus-maze, as one might expect, is a maze in the shape of a plus which is elevated about 2.5 feet of the floor. This maze is a well-accepted standard for examining anxiety and the anxiogenic and anxiolytic effects of various pharmacological agents. Two opposing arms of the maze have high walls, while the remaining two arms have no walls. Animals are placed into the maze and are allowed to freely explore it for a predetermined amount of time. Animals with high anxieity, will spend their time in the walled arms of the maze, whereas animals with low anxiety will venture out to explore the unwalled arms.

Neurosurgery

The Behavioral and Cognitive Neuroscience lab has dedicated space for rodent neurosurgeries. This space is equipped with a stereotaxic apparatus with adaptors for neonatal surgery and microinjections. A multiple syringe injection pump, electrolytic lesion generator, deskt0p sterilizer, thermoregulation unit, and miscellaneous surgical instruments round out the general surgical facility. Some of Dr. Flint's recent projects have involved establishing animals models of autism and schizophrenia using neonatal amygdala and hippocampus lesions and the implantation of cannulae for studies of protein synthesis and amnesia.

Operant Conditioning

The neuroscience lab is equipped with two computer automated operant conditioning chambers that permit the examination of voluntary learning in rats. Animals may be reinforced with sweetened water for pressing a lever in the appropriate pattern.

Startle Response & Prepulse Inhibition

Startle response equipment may be used to examine simple non-associative learning processes such as habituation and sensitization in rodents. In addition, programming this automated equipment to examine a phenomena called prepulse inhibition allows neuroscientists to examine a behavioral model of schizophrenia.